Scientists and the Ethics of Cold War Weapons Research Sarah Bridger Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2011 © 2011 Sarah Bridger All rights reserved ABSTRACT Scientists and the Ethics of Cold War Weapons Research Sarah Bridger This dissertation examines scientists‘ views concerning the ethics of U.S. weapons research and military advising, through the changing politics and economy of the Cold War. After the development of the atomic bomb, the Manhattan Project generation of physicists posed a series of troubling ethical questions: To what extent are scientists responsible for the military applications of their work? What are the political obligations of technical experts? What are the ideal relations among academia, industry, and the military? During the post-Sputnik science boom, many elite physicists used their policy influence to encourage government support for scientific research and to secure stronger arms control measures, an effort that culminated in the ratification of the Partial Test Ban Treaty in 1963. But after the enthusiastic expansion of science advising in the late 1950s, the war in Vietnam sorely tested scientists‘ support for weapons research and government work. Key controversies that elicited substantial ethical debate included the use of chemical defoliants and gases in Vietnam and the participation of the secretive Jason scientists in developing an electronic barrier to prevent North Vietnamese incursions into South Vietnam. By the end of the decade, campuses and professional societies were riven by clashes over defense contracting and academic ―neutrality‖ in the context of the war in Vietnam. Whereas ethical debates in the aftermath of the Manhattan Project tended to be framed in individualist terms, the controversies of the late 1960s and early 1970s took place on the much larger scale of governments and institutions. The upheaval produced some changes in university contracting policies, but with ambiguous results, and the public disaffection of some top scientists led the Nixon administration to dismantle the entire Eisenhower-era presidential science advisory system. The ethical debates of the Vietnam era cast a long shadow, shifting popular attitudes toward science and heavily influencing the character of scientists‘ opposition to the Strategic Defense Initiative during the 1980s. Scientists and the Ethics of Cold War Weapons Research Table of Contents List of Tables and Graphs…………………..………………………………………………ii Acknowledgments…………………………………..…………………………………….. iii Dedication………………………………………………...…………………………………v From Bomb to Test Ban Introduction: Los Alamos and the Ethical Dilemmas of the Cold War…………………….1 Chapter 1: Government Scientists, Sputnik, and the Test Ban………………………….....15 The Science of Vietnam Overview………………………………………………………………………………...... 92 Chapter 2: Chemicals and Ethics………………………………………………………….. 95 Chapter 3: Advising the Pentagon…………………………………………………………174 Institutions and Neutrality in Wartime Overview…………………………………………………………………………………..252 Chapter 4: MIT and the March 4 Movement……………………………………………....255 Chapter 5: The Problem of Neutrality for Academia and Professional Societies…………315 From Vietnam to Star Wars Epilogue: Science, Politics, and Ethics after Vietnam……………………………………..358 Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………..383 i List of Tables and Graphs Federal Obligations for Research & Development to Academia, 1955-1964…………..29 Types of Defoliants…………………………………………………………………….114 Princeton Research Funding, Selected Departments and Agencies……………………346 Federal Investment in R&D, 1955-1989……………………………………………….367 Federal Investment in R&D, 1965-1974……………………………………………….367 ii Acknowledgments This dissertation would not have been possible without the aid of many people and institutions. I am enormously grateful for the financial assistance for research and writing provided by the Doris G. Quinn Foundation, New York University‘s Center for the United States and the Cold War, the Philadelphia Area Center for History of Science, the LBJ Foundation, the Kennedy Library Foundation, the Caltech Archives, the Chemical Heritage Foundation, the Princeton University Library, the American Institute of Physics‘ Center for History of Physics, and Columbia University‘s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and History Department. I also benefited greatly from the advice and expertise of many scholars, archivists, and friends, including, most crucially, my dissertation committee: Eric Foner, Elizabeth Blackmar, Alan Brinkley, Daniel Kevles, and David Rosner. A woefully partial list of others to whom I owe thanks includes Barbara Fields, Andrew Jewett, Michael Nash, Amy Offner, Rebecca Onion, Sarah Phillips, Andrew Russell, Marilyn Young, and the members of my Columbia cohort, among many others. Joshua Bridger, Rebecca Onion, and Daniela Gerson also deserve a lifetime of gifts and favors in return for offering extended hospitality and assistance with grace and good cheer. Peter and Deena Bridger provided me with a beautiful writing space in Florida, as did Peter Kelman and Therese Mageau in Brooklyn. Alison Bridger, Jeffrey Sobell, Vincent DeLeo, and Adrienne Foran made life bearable. More than a decade ago, the legendary Jack Thomas encouraged me on this path, and I am very grateful for his advice and example. His memory haunts many corners of this iii dissertation, as do the memories of my grandparents, Homer Bridger and Lillian Simon, to whom this work is dedicated. Finally, I owe an enormous debt to my parents, Mark and Maxine Bridger, without whose support and care I surely would have abandoned this project years ago. iv In loving memory of Homer J. Bridger and Lillian L. Simon v 1 Part I: From Bomb to Test Ban Introduction: Los Alamos and the Ethical Dilemmas of the Cold War In 1947, in the aftermath of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, physicist Robert Oppenheimer famously observed that physicists had ―known sin.‖ In his reflections on the creation of nuclear weapons, and in the many hundreds of essays, memoirs, interviews, testimonies, and oral histories concerning the Manhattan Project scientists, the language of morality and ethics is ubiquitous. Physicists invoked notions of guilt, evil, obligation, patriotism, regret, and disillusionment. Many, like the refugee physicist Victor Weisskopf, joined the project out of a sense of patriotism for the United States and fear of Nazi development of atomic weapons. As Weisskopf recalled in a 1991 memoir, ―There was never any thought of turning this down. How could I have refused an offer to join the best people in the country in a project of such enormous importance? How could I have refused to participate in the war effort of a country that had accepted and supported us so generously?‖1 But as he worked on the project, Weisskopf‘s views evolved, in confusing directions. He began to realize the full destructive potential of the bomb, which frightened him, even as the intellectual challenges and satisfactions of his research grew more compelling. He recalled that: Some of us, including myself, secretly wished that the difficulties would be insurmountable. We were all aware that the bomb we were trying to develop would be such a terrible means of destruction that the world might be better off without it. … Then, imperceptibly, a change of attitude came over us. As we became more deeply involved in the day-to-day work of our collective task, any misgivings that we had at the start began to fade, and slowly the great aim became the overriding driving force: We had to achieve what we set out to do.2 1 Victor Weisskopf, The Joy of Insight: Passions of a Physicist (New York: Basic Books, 1991), 121. 2 Weisskopf, 128. 2 Even after Germany‘s surrender, Weisskopf and his colleagues, with one notable exception, blithely continued on with their work. Weisskopf later wrote, ―the reaction most of us had was both interesting and somewhat depressing. It showed how deeply we scientists got attached to the task that was set before us and to the solution of the remaining technical problems…. in retrospect, I have often been disappointed that, at the time, the thought of quitting did not even cross my mind.‖3 Only Joseph Rotblat, the British physicist who would go on to found the international Pugwash arms control movement, objected to the continuance of bomb research. For some Manhattan Project scientists, the Trinity test of July 1945 proved a turning point in their ethical views of their own work; for others, it was the actual use of the bomb in Japan. Weisskopf was shocked at what he considered the unnecessary, and criminal, decision to drop a second atomic bomb on Nagasaki. For Weisskopf and the other scientists who felt the ethical burden of their wartime contributions, one pathway to redemption lay in political action. As Alice Kimball Smith described in A Peril and a Hope, during the war years a small, prestigious, and influential group of scientists organized politically for three goals: to avoid actual use of the bomb in favor of a ―demonstration‖ in an uninhabited location, to share bomb information with the Allies, and, after the war, to establish international civilian control of nuclear energy.4 To pursue these goals, scientists drafted petitions, lobbied politicians, and founded the Federation of Atomic Scientists (later the Federation of American Scientists) and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. 3 Weisskopf, 147. 4 Alice Kimball Smith,